The ‘other’ public school
Charter institutions are on the rise, but jury’s still out on their success
The framed sign hangs, a bit crookedly, on a sky-blue wall in the Emerson School office.
“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world,” it reads.
Small groups of people scurry past the sign. They’re answering the phones. Leading kids in from their outdoor exercise. Dealing with cleaning up after a sick child in the boys’ restroom. Asking whether a visitor is the insurance guy.
And, in their own harried way, trying to change Portland’s educational world. Or at least this small chunk of it.
The Emerson School, housed in a former Montessori school space on the south edge of Portland’s Pearl District, is one of two new charter schools that opened in Portland this fall. That makes six public charter schools now quietly operating in the city, each working to offer kids and parents an alternative to traditional public schools.
The charter schools Ñ like the 34 other fledgling public charter schools across the state Ñ get public funding from the state of Oregon and are free to any student who enrolls. But they operate independently of local school boards and aren’t required to follow most local or state education regulations.
The schools espouse a range of educational visions, exemplified by Emerson and the other new Portland charter school, Victory Middle Charter School, which is housed in several rooms at the Blazers Boys and Girls Club in inner Northeast Portland.
The founders of Emerson believe in “project-based” learning and kids exploring ideas in part through trips into the community. There are no real textbooks, and no real homework, but a lot of reading and writing and math problems based on real-world and kid-world issues.
The founder of Victory School, meanwhile, thinks Portland schools have abandoned the education of poor kids by abandoning basic educational principles. Victory students work out of textbooks and complete worksheets with questions that former newspaper publisher and school founder Rich Blizzard sometimes writes himself about various chapter readings.
But as varied as Victory and Emerson are, their founders agree on what almost all charter advocates agree: that traditional public schools aren’t working for many children. And that they can create schools that do better.
“I don’t think public schools are failing our lowest-performing kids or our highest-performing kids,” says Jo Sigmund, a longtime teacher and a co-founder of the Emerson School. “I think they’re failing all of our kids.”
The nation’s charter school movement was already almost a decade old when Oregon legislators approved the state’s charter school law in 1999.
So Oregon still has many fewer charter schools than many states. California, for example, has more than 400.
“Given the analogy of the tortoise and the hare ... we might be more the tortoise,” says Joni Gilles, a charter school specialist with the Oregon Department of Education. She adds that some states that quickly started many charter schools also had many quick failures.
Charter school advocates are heartened, however, by the 17 Oregon charter schools that opened their doors this year, and the dozens that have won federal grants to begin planning their schools.
“It’s going pretty well,” says Rob Kremer, a charter school advocate and consultant who helps organizers prepare Oregon charter school proposals.
Charter school advocates are becoming critical of one aspect of the state’s charter law, however Ñ or how school districts are interpreting it.
The law expects local school boards to sponsor the charter schools. But the charter schools can draw students Ñ and thus state education money Ñ away from the sponsoring districts. So school boards, eyeing that potential money drain, can’t be objective judges on the potential value of a charter school, charter advocates say.
The Portland school board repeatedly rejected the proposal from Blizzard and two Portland district teachers for what would become Victory Charter. Board members said Blizzard and the two teachers Ñ who are no longer associated with the school Ñ didn’t show that the school would have the curriculum or educational expertise to succeed.
Eventually, Blizzard appealed to the state Board of Education, which agreed in January to sponsor the school in spite of Portland’s rejections. Victory became Oregon’s first state-sponsored charter school.
Elke Geiger, who researches charter schools for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, says those issues can arise in states that call for local school boards to be the primary charter “authorizers.”
“It would be like asking Wal-Mart if Kmart can come to town,” she says.
This summer, the state school board upheld the Corvallis school district’s rejection of a charter school Ñ a rejection that came because district officials believed it couldn’t afford to lose the state funds for the 170 students who were expected to attend the charter.
Still, Portland district and state officials point out that charter schools are being approved by school boards in Portland and throughout the state. Besides Emerson, the Portland district now sponsors Trillium Charter School, a K-11 school in its second year, and CM2’s Opal Charter school, a K-5 school in its third year.
And Gilles says only six Oregon charter schools have been rejected by school boards and not had the opportunity to amend their proposals to get later approval.
The biggest questions about Oregon charters haven’t been answered, however Ñ because most are still too new. Will the charters actually be able to show they’re educating children better than traditional schools?
And if they do, will those schools be able to generate enough revenue to keep themselves in business?
Emerson and Victory have no measurable results yet, of course. And studies of some of the older charter schools have shown mixed results.
The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory studied the 17 Oregon charter schools operating during the 2001-02 school year and found that parents overwhelmingly liked the schools’ performances. But the study also found that the charter schools hadn’t been able to document that they were reaching their performance goals, or that their students were meeting grade-level standards. Schools and evaluators need to define and use performance goals that are more easily measured, the study said.
“A lot of times they’re being measured by a yardstick that doesn’t make sense for what they’re doing,” Geiger said. About Oregon charter schools’ performances so far, she said: “As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out.”
In the meantime, the fledgling Oregon charters must deal with tight finances.
Charter schools can get up to $350,000 in federal planning and implementation grants. Once they begin operating, for every child they enroll, they get 80 percent of the roughly $5,000 in state money given to their home public school district for the education of that child. The home school district keeps up to 20 percent of the state money for monitoring and administration.
The limited funding often means it’s difficult for charters to find affordable and appropriate building space. And it means the salaries for their teachers Ð generally non-union teachers Ñ are often below those of traditional public schools.
“Our salaries are comparable (for beginning teachers),” said Arianne Newton, business director for Portland’s Trillium Charter School. “But we can’t keep up with a 20-year experienced teacher in the Portland public school system.”
But teachers attracted to teaching in charter schools are lured by things other than money, Newton and other charter school advocates say.
Many teachers are attracted by the nonunion, nonbureaucratic learning environment where a handful of teachers and administrators can decide on their own about how the school should operate.
“These teachers believe in what they’re doing,” Newton says. “They want to have an opportunity to teach this way. They’ve never had an opportunity to teach this way, in many cases.”
The Emerson School’s Sigmund says that while her years of teaching experience would bring her a roughly $65,000 per year salary if she worked for a Portland district school, she will this year make the maximum Emerson teachers’ salary of $35,500.
And she prefers it that way, she says.
“I’d rather make $35,500 in a program I believe in and that I loved, than make $65,000 and have to be in a school where I have no say in what happens.”
She and her co-founders envisioned small class sizes at Emerson School. The school’s charter limits class sizes to 22 students. And with 100 students in Emerson’s first year, class sizes range from nine to 22.
And they planned the school to be what public schools often aren’t, Sigmund says Ñ “challenging and engaging and exciting É and (a school) that really allows children to experience the real world as much as possible.”
The time-tested results may be months or years away.
But many Emerson parents have already been won over.
“I’m really positive on this place,” says Dennis Nyman, whose two sons attend Emerson. “There’s just a tremendous amount of devotion and energy with the people down there.”